Video transcript

SPEAKER 1: The Fourth Floor
of the Museum of Modern Art, in the room devoted to pop art. And we're looking at a
really great painting. SPEAKER 2: It's actually
a really large painting. SPEAKER 1: And it's not
really a painting, entirely. It's called "Gold Marilyn"
as in Marilyn Monroe. It's from 1962. And it's not only that it's
big, but it feels expansive, because most of the
canvas is covered with this kind of slightly
metallic bronzish gold paint. SPEAKER 2: Marilyn's
head sort of floating-- SPEAKER 1: In a
rectangle in the center. SPEAKER 2: In the
very center of it. SPEAKER 1: Too small. I mean, really sort
of weirdly isolated within the plane of the gold. But look at Marilyn's head. First of all, this is
interesting because it was from, if I
remember correctly, the last photo session
that she vetted and she sort of approved. And if you look at it, it's
actually terribly printed. It's not painted at all. SPEAKER 2: No. It's a print, right? SPEAKER 1: Yeah, from
a newspaper, right? From a photograph from
a newspaper that's been blown up, printed in
black, and then really garishly over-printed with
bad registration with these horrible
colors that came right out of Dick Tracy comic strips. This yellow on top of the
black for the hair, right? SPEAKER 2: And the red for the
lipstick, and the green eye shadow. SPEAKER 1: Oh, god. This turquoise. It's just awful, isn't it? And then, really,
the most glamorously garish, the red of the
lips over the black. Now, this was right
after her suicide. So this is very powerful stuff. So this is almost in memorial. I think it's got
religious overtones. I think this is a kind of icon. I think that the
gold is functioning like the gold in a
Byzantine painting, and she's replaced
the Virgin Mary. She is, in our consumer culture,
in our culture of glamour, of fame, which was incredibly
important to Warhol, she is now-- SPEAKER 2: Well,
that is our culture. That is who we are. SPEAKER 1: And that's
Warhol's brilliance, that he's not thinking about
the history of art so much as what is authentic to now. And in fact, let's go back
to the printing issue. Warhol, I think, makes this
really interesting assessment, which is that painting is no
longer an entirely authentic process in 1962, when
we live in a world that is a world of manufacture,
of mass production. Then he steps back
and he stops painting. He starts making prints,
which are in multiple. He starts hiring people to
make his prints for him, and he does this in a studio
which calls the factory. This has got to have been
upsetting, in fact, to people who were still looking
for the craft of painting. SPEAKER 2: Painting. SPEAKER 1: And worse than that,
what pop's main issue was, turning the still life, the
landscape, traditional history painting, what was
left of it, all of those, in a sense ancient
traditions, on its head and looking to popular culture. I mean, painting no longer
the Virgin Mary but a pop icon is an incredibly
powerful, aggressive statement against Western culture. It was Lichtenstein who was
asked in-- I think it was 1961 or '62-- what was pop art? And he said after
abstract expressionism, we could take an oil-soaked
rag, put it on the wall, and somebody would
call it a work of art. We were looking for something
that was still despicable. And he said the thing that
was still really despicable was popular visual culture. SPEAKER 2: Right. SPEAKER 1: Was the stuff
of our commercial world. SPEAKER 2: The low culture. To me this opens
up a whole issue about identity and the
way we assume identity. SPEAKER 1: This is not Marilyn. In fact, we don't have any
access to who she actually is at all. SPEAKER 2: Exactly. SPEAKER 1: What we
have here is her mask.